LITMIR.BIZ

      The Reds infield: Gene Freese, Eddie Kasko, Jim Baumer, and Gordy Coleman.

      DeWitt and Hutchinson also agreed that the team’s middle infield needed shoring up. The six-foot, 180-pound Eddie Kasko had been named by members of the Cincinnati chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America the team’s Most Valuable Player in 1960 while primarily playing third base, but he was a shortstop by trade and didn’t have the power most teams look for in third basemen. The bespectacled former Cardinal, who’d been acquired after the 1958 season, also played some games at second base in 1960, but Billy Martin had been the primary second baseman and had hit just .246 at the age of thirty-two. The Reds sold him to the Braves after the season.

      The Reds also had a couple of middle-infield prospects in Cuba native Leo Cardenas and Venezuelan Elio Chacon, but Cardenas was just twenty-one, had played just forty-eight games in the majors, and his defense was unproven. Chacon was twenty-three, but similarly inexperienced.

      The biggest job was getting the pitching in shape, and DeWitt knew he wasn’t going to acquire good pitchers without giving up something of value. He also knew that he had at least two dependable shortstops on his team in Kasko and Roy McMillan, a fielding wizard who’d won the first three Gold Gloves at his position after the award was initiated in 1957. The first year’s awards weren’t split between the leagues, meaning McMillan was considered to be the best-fielding shortstop in baseball. Gold Gloves were presented in both leagues starting in 1958, and McMillan won the National League’s in 1958 and 1959, but he never was a good, consistent hitter, and six seasons of playing 150 or more games in each season seemed to be catching up to him. He played in just seventy-nine games in 1959 and 124 in 1960, while turning thirty-one years old.

      Meanwhile, Hutchinson had identified a hulking right-hander named Joey Jay as a pitcher who might fit into the Reds plans. The six-foot-four, 228-pound Jay had broken into the major leagues in 1953 at the age of seventeen as a bonus baby with the Milwaukee Braves, who had given him such a large amount of money to sign that rules of the time made it mandatory that he be on the team’s major-league roster—one of that group of players known as “bonus babies.” His first career start, in fact, was a three-hit shutout of Cincinnati in Milwaukee on September 20, 1953, but his biggest claim to fame stemmed from being the first product of Little League baseball to reach the major leagues.

      Jay also had pitched well enough to be named the National League Player of the Month for July 1958, when he was 5–2 with a 1.39 ERA, five complete games and two shutouts in seven starts, but the true indication of where he stood in Milwaukee’s pitching plans came in the World Series. He wasn’t even included on the post-season roster.

      Jay suffered from joining a staff dominated by accomplished veterans such as left-hander Warren Spahn and right-handers Lew Burdette and Gene Conley, which left few opportunities for a precocious youngster to work. He never made more than nineteen starts in any of his first seven seasons, and he didn’t help himself with constant struggles to keep his weight down, which led to slow starts that helped create a reputation for laziness.

      “Jay had good potential, but he’d never done a lot for Milwaukee,” Ferguson said. “He had a tough time cracking their starting rotation. People thought he could be a good pitcher, but he hadn’t done it a lot.”

      Jay also suffered from a classic tradeoff. Sure, the large signing bonus was great, but experience is priceless. Few managers are willing to give regular work to an eighteen-year-old kid with no experience. Charlie Grimm, Milwaukee’s manager when Jay joined the Braves, wasn’t any different.

      “Charlie Grimm resented me for that reason,” Jay recalled. “Nothing against me personally, but I was taking up a roster spot. It cost me a couple of seasons, because by the time I was able to go to the minors, I’d already lost those first two years.”